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Dell EMC believes its vast enterprise portfolio is what channel partners and end-users alike are seeking as challenges such as workforce, transformation loom large.

The vendor's partner programme hinges on a commitment of simplicity, an aim it believes is satisfied by bringing together Dell and EMC's offering under a single channel set-up.

"We are now the largest IT company in the industry with the broadest product portfolio," Cheryl Cook, VP global channels and alliances at Dell EMC, told Channelnomics Europe.

"We are all talking about the transformational challenges in the industry. I believe our partners, just like our customers, are looking to narrow the number of vendors they are doing business with."

Cook said organisations are working hard just to keep pace with the various challenges that their lines of business are presenting.

"When you look at the breadth of our portfolio, which includes all the client and PC-based edge devices, we recognise workforce transformation is one of those challenging areas," said Cook.

"So whether it be new advances like converged infrastructure and core data centre infrastructure to support all those new workloads, we find ourselves in a unique place that our solution provider partner ecosystem can solve more areas of the customers' challenges by working with Dell EMC than having to source multiple vendor partners to do that."

Cook also claimed that Dell EMC has the industry's largest R&D budget as it looks to continually innovate.

"We have a commitment to invest for the long-term and to invest $4.5bn a year in R&D. So we are also a thought-leadership innovation company that will continue to innovate around, for example, the software-enabled data centre and around new technologies and capabilities," she said.

"Partners can have confidence working with Dell EMC in the breadth of the solutions we have to help address customers' challenges today. But we also have a forward-looking innovative agenda to be driving and delivering this transformational change.

"We are helping to shape the new technologies of tomorrow that will help customers along this transformational journey.

"Consolidation is occurring in the PC client landscape and we are one of those consolidators. We have a company at extreme scale and we think this scale helps in the consolidation process," added Cook.